Prof. Dr. Peter Zentel, Chair of Education for Students with Intellectual Disabilities at LMU, discusses in an interview the vital role of AI in supporting students with disabilities. He highlights the use of AI tools for enhancing accessibility, particularly for those with visual and hearing impairments. Zentel emphasizes the significant number of students with disabilities, especially mental health issues, and the challenges in creating a fully inclusive educational environment in the digital era.

In a recent feature in LMU's research magazine EINSICHTEN, Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schütze from the Center for Information and Language Processing discusses his pioneering work on multilingual AI software for automatic translation, particularly for underrepresented languages. His research, a blend of computational linguistics and AI, focuses on overcoming data limitations to enhance AI's proficiency in a broad spectrum of languages.

In the recent issue of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, a study led by Fiona Draxler from LMU's Institute for Informatics examines the intriguing phenomenon of AI ghostwriting. The research delves into how individuals perceive and declare authorship when using large language models (LLMs) to generate text. This study, which avoids the legal aspects and focuses on the human perspective, reveals complex interactions between perceived ownership and declared authorship in AI-generated content. The team found that participants often claimed authorship for AI-generated texts, even when they didn't write them or feel ownership over them.

A team led by Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle, Chair of Medieval and Modern Art History at LMU, and Prof. Dr. Ralph Ewerth, Head of the Visual Analytics research group at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hanover, is developing an AI algorithm to identify similarities between images, enhancing art historical analysis. The project, titled “Reflection-driven Artificial Intelligence in Art History,” aims to incorporate art history knowledge into AI to assist in contextual image analysis. Funded by the German Research Foundation, it involves building a data library from publicly accessible metadata and images with expired copyrights.

A study, that was conducted by Daniel Racek, a doctoral student of Prof. Dr. Göran Kauermann at LMU’s Department of Statistics, together with partners from the University of Bath and Technical University of Munich, reveals a shift in language use on Ukrainian social media from Russian to Ukrainian since the start of the Russian war. Analyzing over four million tweets, the research team found this trend to be a political response, with users consciously reducing their use of Russian as a way to distance themselves from Russia amid the conflict.

Prof. Dr. Björn Ommer, who holds the Chair of AI for Computer Vision and Digital Humanities/the Arts and developed the diffusion model that serves as the basis for Generative AI  Stable Diffusion, has been appointed as a member of the Bavarian AI Council. The AI Council was established by the Bavarian state government in 2020 and has since served as an advisory body to the state government. Furthermore Ommer held the opening keynote at NeurIPS 2023 Conference, Süddeutsche has featured his talk, where he demanded to develop smaller and more economical models.

The Steering Committee of the AI-HUB@LMU comprising representatives from all 18 faculties of LMU has convened for the first time. The governance structure was established, naming Prof. Dr. Frauke Kreuter, Prof. Dr. Eyke Hüllermeier, and Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok as spokespersons, alongside a coordination team. The committee deliberated on the AI-HUB's research priorities, its mission statement for the upcoming website, and planned this year's events, including Round Tables and an AI Symposium, to enhance research and teaching in AI and data science at LMU.

 

Data science plays a major role in science, industry, and business, and close collaboration between all parties involved is necessary. The German Data Science Days (GDSD) on 7-8 March will bring together data scientists from various fields to create a forum for users and experts. The aim of the event is to identify and discuss new methods and fields of application and, moreover, to enhance the professional image of data scientists. The German Data Science Days are organized by the elite master programme “Data Science” at LMU München in cooperation with the German Data Science Society (GDS) e.V.